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Over the past two days i’ve been experimenting with databending images and sounds. I’ve become more interested in digital and new media work and I have always been attracted to glitching data but have wondered about its practical application and its status as a quirky gimmick but I am still going to investigate its creative possibilities for making installations and performances.

My first experiment has been with photoshop and audacity. Using photoshop I create patterns like, thin orange vertical lines, anime bunnies in repetition, diagonals, curved paint splatters, pixel dots. Depending on the size of canvas it seems to determine the sound clips length and depth as time goes down the page and depth of noise across. Using just single pixels and repeating it in a pattern I have been able to create sounds akin to a midi sequencer. More complex patterns become pops and clicks that ascend and descend in sound and intensity. If very little blank space is available on the pattern it becomes a wall of white noise, so balancing the spacing of blank space to patterned space is important.

At the moment the only function I can think for this kind of databending is for white noise soundscapes in improvisation/performance but it could also be mixed live as even just changing the volume levels can completely change the way the sound works and which sounds become more dominant, the data sometimes just stopped playing at all unless the sound levels were finely balanced.